


Out of Sight of the Moon

by masonverger_rising



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:08:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5511413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masonverger_rising/pseuds/masonverger_rising
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will has always been a little different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of Sight of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whalebellies](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=whalebellies).



The building around him growls and thrums. It’s like being stuck inside a giant kettledrum, the howls and shrieks of the other inmates echo and linger, ringing in Will’s ears. Instinctively he wants to back into the corner of his cell, bare his teeth and snarl at everyone who comes near. He forces himself to sit on the cot, hands on his knees. He forces himself to be still and calm.

Will knows the orderlies are watching him. He can sense their eyes on him as they pass, can feel their gazes crawling over his skin. One in particular tends to linger while he cleans, his hands tend to linger when he straps Will into restraints. _Hybristophile_ is the word that sits on his tongue when it is not occupied by the snarls he forces back. It has never been easy for Will to shut off his senses, to ignore and deflect. Now, for the sake of his sanity it is more important than ever.

His time is short, after all.

By his reckoning — though he might have lost track of the calendar with the fever, the lost time — the full moon is in three days. Three days until he’s exposed. A lifetime of hiding who he is. _What_ he is. Will guesses that he should feel fear, that he should feel anger, perhaps, beyond what has been done to him, to the injustice of all of this. But it doesn’t feel like injustice. It feels like inevitability. Like the forces of nature conspiring to reach this point.

What he wonders most about, in the abstract hours of the morning, with the orderlies slyly peering in at him, is what happens after. Surely they will notice, and surely they will do _something_. Experimentation. Study. The compounding of the worst of this place. Entering these places has always held a kernel of fear. What if they don’t let him out — he’s heard the way people speak about him. _Special, unique_. The first time he’d set foot in this place Doctor Chilton had made it abundantly clear that he would take any chance he could get to study Will’s _uniqueness_. And now he might just get his chance.

And now he might just get a whole lot more than he bargained for.

 

Time is measured in meals, in cleaning rounds. In far off cries cut short. Will retreats to his bunk as the days crawl by. Jack Crawford visits but he can’t bring himself to speak, he hears Chilton in the hall, whispering about conversion disorder and radical therapies. Their retreating footsteps. An orderly wheels the food cart down the hall. Will counts down the cells it stops at, counts his heartbeats and listens to his breathing, it seems harsh in his ears. Has it already begun?

The clatter of the tray, that same orderly peering in at him. Will closes his eyes, he feels sweat popping out all over, itching as it trickles across his ribs. He can hear the scuff of the man’s sneaker on the floor, the crinkle of his white coat. He’s lingering at the bars of Will’s cage, watching — has it already begun?

Slowly, Will forces himself to open his eyes, turns to look at the orderly standing there, hands curled around the bars (against the safety regulations — Will could close the space between them in seconds, get one of his fingers between his teeth and just bite it right off). The man doesn’t look alarmed. His brow is furrowed and he’s staring, but with concern rather than horror.

“You need the infirmary? Y’look feverish.”

Will lifts his hand to his face, looks at the back of his wrist. Nothing. Sparse hairs, a faint scratch where he’d caught himself on his restraints yesterday. He shakes his head mutely and turns over onto his side, facing the wall. A bone-deep ache has crept into him, curling in his gut and cramping his muscles. After a while he hears the orderly’s footsteps retreating.

Sleep finds Will in the small hours of the morning, when he’s worn out from shivering and puking. He goes under swiftly and is caught up in the undertow of his memories, dredging up questionable comfort. An antlered silhouette looms behind his eyelids and he plunges down.

The woods were dense, but Will found a clearing where a felled tree had made space for wildflowers to spring up. He smelled rot and perfume mingled in the air and he wandered carefully, bare feet inching along the ground as he lifted his head to watch white butterflies alighting on the flowers, trembling there a moment and then lifting into the air, circling. The sun was yellow and warm on his bare shoulders.

A doe, almost full grown. Her neck stretched out toward the tree line. Will looked at her hooves for the longest time, at the dainty shape of them. It hadn’t rained for weeks and he could still see her prints in the dirt, circling and circling, and then the smeary marks where she had fallen. His da was teaching him how to track animals like that, for when there wasn’t enough money to buy food. His da wasn’t a hunter, but with the river too sick to catch fish in, they had to eat something. The wound in her leg was what did it, he thought. It was open and already rotted down to the bone. She’d been shot, and then she hadn’t died. Or she hadn’t died for a long while.

Will could see the insects under her skin, white things crawling through her fur. His da had shown him how to use worms for bait fishing, how to put them on the hook so they still wriggle. He wiped his face and looked up at the canopy, at the circle of blue sky between the trees. Part of him was repulsed. He had a faint desire to run back into the trees, to try and find his da and ask to go home, right away. But he’s already seen it, the doe will stay with him, behind his eyelids, for a long time — forever?

He looked at her again, crouched down and sat on his heels, his arms folded under his chin, when he felt a hand close on his shoulder, broad and warm. Will twisted back and saw his da standing behind him, his weathered face creased with a concern that would never be voiced. “C’mon, up you get.”

Exhaustion washed over Will then, he swayed on his feet and Da reached down, picked him up and carried him. Out of the woods, following the back roads back to the trailer to sleep off the long night. Dreams of running, of long shadows under the bright moon. Dreams within dreams within …

 

A sharp, repetitive sound cuts through darkness. It’s difficult to breathe, like a weight is pressing down over his whole body, he’s slick with sweat and his mouth and throat are dry. A pained grunt escapes him and he tries to lift a hand to his face but he can’t, there’s a pain in his wrist. A heart monitor. The sound is a heart monitor beeping, he’s in the infirmary.

There’s a hand on his arm and then someone pries his eyelid open, a white light seems to lance right through to the back of his skull and Will groans. He hears a pen click, the scratch of writing.

“Water?” Will’s voice is a cracked whisper.

“Here.” The nurse fits a straw between his lips and Will almost chokes on the first gulp. He drinks it down greedily, though it’s a small cup and the relief is painfully short lived.

Gradually he manages to open his eyes, though they smart under the lights. He’s cuffed to a bed in a windowless white room, “What happened?” He recalls lying on his bunk, the orderly looking at him. He remembers pain, and then nothing. “How long have I been out?”

The nurse clears her throat and glances around, as though she’s looking for backup.

Anxiety rolls off her and for a moment Will is caught up in it, and outraged on her behalf that the management — that _Chilton_ — haven’t improved their procedures after what happened with Abel Gideon.

“You’ve been running a fever.” She busies herself with his IV drip and the monitors he’s still hooked up to. “You had a seizure in your cell. We’ve done some tests and it might be related to the encephalitis.”

_Might be_. So they don’t know what happened to him, and that must mean that he hadn’t _changed_. Will isn’t sure how that could have happened, but his knowledge of his own condition is far from exhaustive. He has been cut off from others like him and he feels he knows hardly anything beyond what he can observe himself. He’s surprised by an ache in his chest, longing. He wishes his father was here to tell him what happened.

When he was small Will Graham believed that his da knew everything. At his da’s knee he learned how to mend broken things, how to make do. In his da’s curt wisdom he came to know the right tools for the job, the right weight for a fishing line. He learned when to hold fast and when to go.

Mostly, he learned when to go.

Quietly. Packing their meagre belongings into a vehicle — sometimes there was only a small tin boat to carry every material possession the Grahams had to their name, just a two stroke engine drawing them away into the night, across still water. Very often Will was hurt that they were leaving again and so soon. It always seemed to be just as he was settling in. After a few years he realised that no matter how long they stayed in one place he always felt like he was still settling. Sometimes Will even found moving nights to be the most comforting; without a trailer to sleep in, or a motel room for the night, they would huddle in the back of the car or the bottom of the boat. Those nights, asleep with his father’s broad back behind him, were some of the easiest for Will, his dreams were sweet and quiet.

But they were always followed by new places and the odd high-profile anonymity of living on the run. Heads would turn to stare after the new kid. For a few days. Then they would lose interest and Will would find himself invisible. Unnoticed. Will knew that this was for the best, that people wouldn’t understand if they knew about him, that they could be cruel. He knew, but it still hurt.

Even then, he knew that it was a hurt that would never ease. It would wear him, and all he could hope was that a callus would form. The world that Will and his father shared was small, though it stretched for miles and miles in any direction they could travel. Their world was engines, their world was a boat on the waves, packed from prow to stern with necessity and nothing more.

Their world is far behind now, in the wake of a lifetime. He clings to pieces where he can, he works with his hands and he remembers everything his da taught him. He makes do. Or he did. Now all he has is memories, the cell, the infirmary bed. Now he’s caged far away and out of sight — out of sight even of the moon. He sees antlered shadows in his sleep, and sometimes hears the click of hooves on the stone floor outside his cell.

 

Infirmary, cage, visitors room, cage, court, cage, infirmary. Time blurs into a shifting mess of images, of rooms that are differentiated more by the people who are poking and prodding, who are talking at him, than by their furnishings or positions. At no point during his incarceration does Will change, at no point is he in a room with a window when the moon is full. He can feel her, even underground, tugging at his cells and calling to him, a call that he can’t answer, but which he has never been so aware of in his life. One month, then next, and the next, the nurse frowns and orders a check on his food, on his medication, drills him on how much water he drinks and how he sleeps. No answers for her.

It is bare days after the full moon when he is released. The familiar country roads are an embrace, a soothing return to a world outside four walls. He appreciates the snow crunching under his boots and the answering rush of joy he feels when his pack of strays greet him, a flurry of wagging tails and curious noses. And if he is short with Alana and Jack, then it is only because of his unwarranted incarceration, it is understandable and very _human_ resentment at how his friends have mistreated him. He tells himself that a day or two, running under the open sky with his pack will dispel this buildup of restless energy he’s accrued, one month at most and he’ll be back to himself.


End file.
